While I can’t find a screen cap of it bigger than a stamp, NatGeo, this month (i.e. June, 2010), decided to try to get the bandwagon rolling again by declaring: “Iceland: Ground Zero for Global Warming.”

Has the statute of limitations run out on ClimateGate or something??

@ECM,
The BP spill has doused the eco-mindshare in oil.

The Columbian Mammoths were bigger than African elephants. They had to fend off saber tooth cats, American lions, dire wolves, and short face bears, fearsome preditors all much larger than any similar land preditors alive today.

And hunter gathers with clovis point spears drove them into extinction?

Could it be there was major climate change, that happened all on its own, that severely impacted large animals (including mankind) world wide? There were shifts in ice sheets that continued until the warming period that started about 12,000 years ago. Large animals in the tropics were able to survive it. Large animals in temperate areas could not.

Dammit, Joe, stop being logical! The world changed and extinctions happened and you KNOW it had to be the humans fault!

Okay Firehand, the guilty party must have been the people idealized in Dances With Wolves…

but that does not compute, that does not compute, I smell something burning, hands shaking, hard to breathe…

Wait! I know! The Mormons did it! It is distressing to lose our collective European guilt!

They didn’t use bows

How to kill mammoths with common household items. Get creative!

I have a Ph.D. in Geology. I earned it by working my way through school over a period of 15 years of post-graduate education. Moreover, I have read widely in earth sciences and both sides of the anthropogenic story since 1990. The most important learning?, “The moment you begin to believe your own hypothesis, you are a dead duck as a scientist.” As it stands now, it appears the story was dominated by demagogues with agenda we can only surmise. Obviously it is important to do everything in a conservative manner. I renew, reuse and recycle every day. I, however, realise that we currently live on a planet where prosperity is at its highest in human history and pre-history. There are demagogues and groups who say this is bad, and I have to shake my head.

As a geologist, because proofs are difficult, I have become very comfortable with the concept of multiple working hypotheses – It is necessary to read widely and to examine the other climate change ideas out there. I’d point out anthropogenic global warming is not a hypothesis. There is no scientific support whatsoever, only belief. It’s a dangerously metastable belief, about to fall over of its own weight.

For instance, the Danes at the Danish National Space Center have been on the case for a long while, studying the sun. Who would have thought the sun would be involved in warming? The first paper to read is Friis-Christensen and Lassen (Science; 1991) If you can find the entire issue in the reference library, you will see the editor’s comment referred to this paper as hitting the ball into the anthropogenic court. The causation is under scientific review, however, and while the radiation from the sun varies only in the fourth decimal place, the magnetism is awesome. The correlation with solar activity broke down when Pinatubo erupted in 1991; my tomatoes did not ripen that summer either. Is this the exception that proves the rule?

The important correlation between warming and cooling is the sunspot peak frequency, not the actual number of spots. However, we all realize correlation is not causation. Sunspot peak frequency proxies for the rise and fall of the sun’s magnetic field, which shields earth from cosmic radiation. Cosmic radiation is currently at its highest ever measured because the sun and earth’s magnetic shields are down; climate is changing. The climate celebrities, however, are linking climate and the carbon economy. Maybe not evil; just wrong. It is probably not the heat; it is the humidity.

The third ranking gas is CO2 (0.0383%), and it does not correlate well with global warming or cooling either; in fact, CO2 in the atmosphere trails warming which is clear natural evidence for its well-studied inverse solubility in water: CO2 dissolves rapidly in cold water and bubbles rapidly out of warm water. CO2 has been rising and Earth and her oceans have been warming. However, the correlation trails.

What about the sun? Svensmark of the Danish National Space Center has experiments scheduled for the Hadron collider to test his basement experiment where cosmic radiation force instantaneous vapour nucleation. Elevated solar flux (> 10 protons per cc) appears to cause fog in the Great Lakes and clouds too.

The hypothesis of the Danish National Space Center is as follows: quiet sun allows the geomagnetic shield to drop. Incoming galactic cosmic ray flux creates low-level clouds, more snow, and more albedo effect as more is heat reflected resulting in a colder climate. An active sun, in contrast, has an enhanced magnetic field that induces Earth’s geomagnetic shield response. Earth has fewer low-level clouds, less rain, snow and ice, and less albedo (less heat reflected) producing a warmer climate.

That is how the bulk of climate change likely works, coupled with (modulated by) solar magnetism (sunspot peak frequency) there are cycles of global warming and cooling like waves in the ocean. When the waves are closely spaced, all the planets warm; when the waves are spaced farther apart, as they have been for this century, all the planets cool.

Many answers yield many new questions: the change in cloud cover is only a small percentage, and the ultimate cause of the solar magnetic cycle may be cyclicity in the Sun-Jupiter centre of gravity. We await more on that.

Although the post 1960s warming period appears to be over, warming and attendant humidity have allowed the principal green house gas, water vapour, to kick in with more clouds, rain and snow depending on where you live to provide the negative feedback that scientists use to explain the existence of complex life on Earth for 550 million years.

We can likely kick much of the carbon economy sometime late the twenty-first century, but we must not rush to judgement for the wrong reason. The planet heats and cools naturally and our gasses are the thermostat. Nothing unusual is going on except for the Orwellian politics. In other words, it is probably not the heat; it is the humidity.